May 19, 2006

Homo journalisticus

The story in
National Geographic News
on the putty-nosed monkeys and their
combination pyow-hack calls (acknowledgment to Evan Bradley,
who made my day slightly sadder by pointing
it out to me) is worse than the one
David Beaver cites.
It is headed:

Monkeys use "sentences",
study suggests

Study suggests nothing of the kind, of course.

In fact
the story itself reports that the author of the scientific report
"cautions that analogies to
human language are not always helpful in understanding the utterances
of animals." Quite so. I guess content means nothing to the headline
writers where science journalism is concerned.

I have no doubt that for a long, long time we shall
continue to see stories recognizing language use in dumb animals and
birds sitting alongside stories about it being absent in various kinds
of humans (Bushmen, undergraduates, primitive tribes, bureaucrats, urban
blacks, Danes, male scions of the Bush family, teenagers, Southerners,
university administrators, and other despised groups). Because,
while it
is completely unclear whether the roots of language are innate, there is
overwhelming evidence of an innate drive in Homo journalisticus
to write stories about talking or understanding being manifested in
chimps,
gorillas,
orangutans,
baboons,
monkeys,
tamarins,
bees,
dolphins,
whales,
parrots,
starlings,
dogs,
bats (yes, bats — see below)
and I don't know what will be next but perhaps donkeys. And the subspecies
Homo journalisticus subeditorialis clearly has a built-in drive
to write wild and goofy headlines for such stories.

I am not exaggerating. You might want to look at
Holy Bat Chat, Batgirl! Medic Is Cracking Bat Code,
about Barbara French, who "has decoded a basic repertoire of bat calls and deciphered the social context in which they are used,"
before you accuse me of exaggerating.
Check this bit, which Mark Liberman pointed out really needed
to be quoted:

French believes the animals are using sounds with syntax. To test the
hypothesis French, [her collaborator the neurophysiologist
George] Pollak, and one of his graduate students are
cataloging all the calls, and analyzing the acoustic structure of each,
to study how sounds are manipulated to produce different meanings.

During mating season, for example, males produce a "territorial
announcement buzz" to woo females. The same sound, albeit at a different
intensity and pace, seems to be used to ward off competing males. "It's
the difference between saying something sweetly, and screaming those
same words — they could have very different meanings," said French.

You might also want to look at
Monkeys Have Accents, Japanese Study Finds, before you suggest that
I am overstating.
There it is reported that "primate researchers have discovered that Japanese macaques can acquire different accents based on where they live — just like humans." Just like humans! No, I'm not
exaggerating.

Why this drive toward drivel in linguistic science
reporting? Is there a
survival advantage conferred by some trait manifesting itself
in credulity concerning
animal communication? Further research is needed.